0. Editor’s Note

The Great Stratagem of Lady Ikedanbu — Judith Huang

I can’t love artificially I’m too busy falling for my electric kettle
— Cai Png

Cactus Girl, Lobster Boy
— Alastair Wee

The Girlfriend
— Andrew Cheah

Keep Nothing on Your Person
— Levin Tan

Singapore goes cyborg but what
does this mean for families?
— Darcel Al Anthony

Science City #26
— Joseph Tan

Tensile Strength
— S.L. Johnson

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent, Part 1
— Vivekanandan Sharan

Cutting the Sapphire: An Interview with Joan Hon, Singapore’s First Sci-Fi Novelist
— Ng Yi-Sheng

A Review: Club Contango by Elaine Boey (Dark Matter INK)
— Wayne Low

A Review: Club Contango by Eliane Boey (Dark Matter INK)

Wayne Low

Wayne is a poet, a fictionist, an opinion writer, and an editor on the Sengkang Sci-Fi Quarterly. His writing can be found in QLRS, SingPoWriMo, margins, Mnemozine, and Post Script. You can usually find him if you're looking.

“Contango” refers to a situation within futures markets where assets are expected to increase in value.¹Widely believed to be an alteration (or “corruption”) of the words “contingent” and “continue”, Contango is a normal state of optimism born from a rejection of the present – insecure, contingent, and continuous – in favour of futures; illusory, unformed, and gleaming.

In the years “close enough to kiss the twenty-second century”, the world of Freeport is made from the economics of HODL, or “holding on for dear life”. In Freeport, unless you are part of the minority rich enough to settle, the precarious future of most of its residents is staved off by any means possible against “the centre [that] cannot hold”. Yet somehow, Freeport survives, its “widening gyre” of ersatz nineteenth-century nostalgia held together by the constant churn of low-level Contractors, shareholder bonds, and ultimately, promises for a liveable future.

It is in this context that protagonist Connie Lam perfectly belongs. Connie is an overstressed, overworked, single mother who runs Club Contango, “an illegal micro-casino” along with her genderless, enigmatic business partner Chance. Connie never has enough, and is barely holding everything in her life together,trading cash investments from grifted side jobs and bad past connections to buy more time against her expired visa. We are plunged into Connie’s life, and carry out the exhausted and unending chase of illusions in the grey areas; a fate we can only assume is common.

But even this razor-thin status-quo comes crashing through when a bad consulting gig and the murder of a former business partner threatens to take away everything Connie has carefully held together. Illusory doubles – clones – of Connie from pasts in now-abandoned offices and futures in street corners multiply across Freeport as Connie races against the hurtling pace of Freeport to protect her child, identity, and her life off Earth.

In an interview with Clarkesworld, author Eliane Boey mentioned that if there is a structuring principle within her work, it is economics. “[I]t’s the economic patterns and structural rules [...] that drive these elements of the world and make it what it is”.² In my opinion, it is precisely this anti-human structure of exhaustion that gives rise to the novel’s poetics of risk; a poetics made literal in Connie Lam’s Club Contango. In the smoky, crowded underground of Lucky 48, Contractors bet on their own failures, against the normal optimism of markets, seeking delta in self-destruction. Later on, as the future of Connie Lam hangs on by an increasingly tenuous thread, risk turns increasingly focused on our main character, circling the fearful like vultures in an overturned sky.

I find that this poetics — and the seamless deployment of it in all parts of the text — is the greatest strength of Eliane Boey‘s writing. In tearing through the pages of Club Contango, readers are constantly pressed up against the cold, rigid structure of its world. At the same time, however, an equal and opposite attention is paid to the music of human connection that weaves through Freeport’s rivets, shadows, and gutters. We witness this beauty simultaneously as cruelty, as authenticity, like every other commodity, is constantly driven up to the surface in the city’s desperate contango.

This deep interrelation between vice and virtue, connection and commodity is best seen when viewing the novel as a sort of mixtape itself. As Club Contango begins in music and never really lets up, readers follow the “cut and blend” of destinies in plain-clothes references to Madonna, Chumbawamba, Shanghai Jazz, and chopped up audio-neural drugs: Loop, Delight, and Racer. And just like Chance’s retro synth, Boey blends elements of neoliberal capitalism, noir, cyberpunk, the corporate world, Singaporean food, and the affronting migraine of being alive, combining them in a way that both wears its influences on its sleeves and yet somehow “feels entirely [her] own”. But, if there’s anything I would criticise about Boey’s debut novel, is that this formula gets repetitive after the halfway mark.

The novel, made up of short, boldly-named sections and chapters, tended to contain a similar pattern of quick punchy action punctuated with witty dialogue and philosophical self-questioning. This style made for a reading experience that initially pushed me along with the momentum of Freeport, but gradually, I felt more out of sync with the pace that the world and its characters were so hellbent on moving at. A large part of this is, no doubt, due to how predictable chapters and whole sections got. The action set pieces all felt equally urgent, equally stressed, and as the tone and style of dialogue remained constant, the novel began blurring together.

Similarly, while the cast of characters and settings were bright, diverse, and interesting, I found their charm to be somewhat faded in the end. Connie ping-pongs between the same few locations, stalked by an affective concoction of dread and nausea. Chance is always mysterious, always threatening to merge into something else. The plot is tight, but that also meant that the story always teetered over the edge of becoming overly claustrophobic and identifiable.

In the same interview, Boey states that Club Contango, which is set as a sequel of sorts to her short story “Contango”,³ was first written as a novella. This could be a reason that nearing the end, the novel felt a little like it was begging to conclude. I felt that both these problems of style and setting could have been made better by including more variation in chapter length, prose style, and perspective. Perhaps this is quite a personal gripe, but as Freeport is a sort of simulacra of Singapore suspended in space, I was exhilarated to find Singaporean elements within the story and found myself yearning for a more expansive landscape, if not by physical space, then by description and pacing.

Despite these issues, I enjoyed Club Contango tremendously. Boey’s debut novel is a rich, immersive world of things both material and immaterial that seems to simultaneously be describing a future state of affairs and the current Singapore perfectly. As societies plunge into moral panics about AI, the futures of labour, and the sheer difficulty of moving past normal states of contango, or growth, Eliane Boey‘s debut novel is a tremendous and nail-biting demonstration of the continuing strength of human resilience and the drive to understand ourselves and our creations.

Whether it is through music, movement, or worldbuilding, Boey, through compelling prose, sketches out her world (and ours) as one of overlapping inhuman economies. Yet, Boey is generous enough to show us the gaps between payment and confirmation; within which fleeting moments of beauty and love, in all their crushing irreality, can be found. Reading Club Contango, I, alongside Connie Lam, found myself led right there, through the twists and shifts of plots and risks, to Freeport. Landing in that strange, faraway colony, I stepped into the future, where the option finally matured, where the price converged, and life could be found pulsating, waiting to be grasped.

¹https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/contango#cite_note-1 ² https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/boey_interview/3 https://darkmattermagazine.shop/blogs/issue-016/contango
Club Contango by Eliane Boey is a publication of Dark Matter INK, a fiction imprint “by the minds behind Dark Matter Magazine”. They also published Other Minds, a SF novella duology, and other stories by Boey. Club Contango is available in ebook and paperback.